Chapter 29
Madelyn
came back to consciousness, only then realizing she’d been out of it.
She’d long since ceased to worry about what she was doing while she was asleep.
Who cared? It wasn’t as if she was trying to impress her audience.
She slowly came back to full awareness, but stayed completely still as she did so.
It had become her habit, that freezing, on the off chance that stretching would alert any of the keep’s inhabitants to her conscious state.
And what was the point of trying to stretch, anyway?
Her feet would just encounter hard, unyielding metal.
No, better that she just remain immobile and unremarkable.
That wasn’t actually very hard anymore, given that her muscles had long since ceased to twitch.
The pain was gone as well. She supposed her nerves had given up trying to tell her that she had been curled in the fetal position for too long.
Besides, movement garnered notice and notice brought attention and she was damned sick of the attention she’d been getting. No, staying still was the best thing to do.
But as she lay there, curled up with her knees to her chin, the cobwebs began to clear from her brain and she realized that several things were quite different from what had become normal during the past twenty-five days.
The floor wasn’t the same. Instead of unyielding stone beneath her, there was something soft. Dirt? She gingerly extended her index finger and scratched. Dirt, not goo. Dirt, not stone under goo.
She breathed in slowly. The smell around her had changed. It smelled of earth and rain and other things that might resemble something quite pleasant if she could get past her own offensiveness. And there was no draft. That was surprising enough that she opened her eyes to find out why.
The first thing she saw, the first thing her pitiful gaze fell upon was a man sitting with his back against the wall of what appeared to be a small hut.
Patrick MacLeod.
Looking perfectly comfortable in his medieval Highlander garb.
She closed her eyes and started to cry. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. It was as if almost four weeks of misery had finally gotten to her, filled her cup right up to the top and spilled over with the relentlessness of Niagara Falls.
“Oh, Madelyn,” he said.
She felt rather than heard him move across the little room. He lay down behind her. And then his arms were around her, his strong, secure arms that promised safety from all the boogeymen who were lurking out there. She felt his hand fumble for hers, then close around her fingers.
Around her broken finger.
Who knew if it was broken still. What she did know was that it hurt like hell, and she cried out in pain before she could stop herself.
Patrick leaned up and over her. “What? What is it?”
“My finger,” she wept hoarsely. “I think it’s broken.”
“Who did it?”
“Neil.”
He laid her hand gently on the floor, settled back down behind her, and gently pulled her close against him. “I’ll tend it later. Now, just lay your head, love, and be at peace.”
She wept until she was too tired to do it any longer. And once she was down to mere sniffles, she let the memories come back to her.
Hearing Patrick’s voice while sitting in her cage.
Seeing him sit at the table with the Fergusson.
Watching him kill six men and make life hell for another.
Then there was the ride, that horrendous ride where all she’d been able to do was clutch the horse’s mane, clutch Patrick’s arm, and pray with all her might that she didn’t either fall off or, worse yet, stay on and shatter into a thousand pieces.
She didn’t remember the end of the ride. She supposed the end had come here, at this hut of very humble origins and no furniture.
Here, with a man who held her as if he had every intention of never letting her go.
She closed her eyes. She had to be hallucinating.
Too much inedible food; too little water.
Her mind had gone, and with it her common sense.
She took a deep breath, then coughed. She opened her mouth to speak, but it came out as a harsh sound.
She swallowed past her parched throat—or tried to, at any rate—and made another attempt.
“Thank you,” she croaked.
“I tried to come sooner,” he said simply. He smoothed his hand over her disgustingly filthy hair, but seemed to take no note of it. “I’m sorry, Madelyn.”
She tried to shake her head, but her muscles set up an appalling protest, so she remained still. “It’s all right.”
She couldn’t say more. What she wanted to do was weep some more, but she didn’t have the strength for it.
What she wanted to do was sleep, but she didn’t have the courage for it.
Too many dreams were lurking, just waiting to spring upon her and leave her trapped again in a cage not fit for a dog.
She closed her eyes, but forced herself to remain lucid.
“What is it with Fergussons wanting me behind bars?” she managed.
“Bloody whoresons,” he said quietly.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Scotland.”
She grunted. “Funny.”
His hand continued its gentle motion. “In Moraig’s house. Or what will be Moraig’s house in the future.”
“And the date?”
He was silent for a few minutes. “Do you know already?”
“I understand it’s sometime in the late fourteenth century. Around 1382.”
“That’s correct.”
“You could have told me.”
“I feared you wouldn’t believe me.” He paused. “I regret it.”
“Ha,” she said, then groaned at too vigorous a movement. “Moraig told me. I should have listened harder.”
“’Tis a bit hard to swallow.”
“I’ll say.” She looked at his hand covering her uninjured hand.
It didn’t look like a medieval hand. Then again, what did she know of it?
It wasn’t as if she’d had the leisure to examine any of the hands she’d come in contact with over the past few weeks.
She very hesitantly curled her fingers toward his.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t believe you? ”
He laced his fingers with her good hand. “Aye.”
“What did it matter to you whether or not I believed you?”
“It mattered,” he said quietly.
She hardly knew what to make of that, so she decided to make nothing.
Maybe he’d tried to tell other people, and they’d thought he was nuts.
Maybe he’d never told anyone before, and she had a trustworthy face.
The maybes could go on forever, and she’d probably never hit on the right one.
There was no sense in trying to figure it out, especially in her current state of misery.
She wanted to say something cheerful, something along the lines of Well, here we are in the Middle Ages, so let’s go out and sightsee some things that are still under construction, shall we? but she couldn’t manage it. It was all she could do to breathe through her smell.
Not that she hadn’t struggled with that before. But it was one thing to stink when the place you were stinking in smelled just as bad. It was another thing to stink in front of a man you had tried, at various and sundry times, to impress.
“I smell,” she announced.
“I’ve smelled worse.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“I have. I’m even sure that I myself have smelled worse.”
She almost managed a smile. “Prove it. Give me examples. Start from your earliest smell and work forward.”
He chuckled. That sound was like rain after a drought. She closed her eyes and let it drench her soul. If he could laugh, here in this place, with a woman in his arms who may as well have spent the past month living in a sewer, maybe there was hope after all.
And how desperately she needed hope. She wondered if she would ever forget what had happened to her.
She wondered, further, if she would ever forget watching Patrick, with an enormous sword in his hand and a look in his eye that should have made anyone with sense run the other way, take out the men inside the Fergusson hall.
She’d never thought she would feel anything but abhorrence for such a thing, but then again, these were men who had laughed as they’d tortured Robert the piper.
They were men who had taken great delight in making her life hell.
Once she’d begun to understand what they were saying, she realized that the only reason she hadn’t been raped was that she was too far beneath them for that.
For the moment.
Who knew what would have happened in the end? She suspected that if it hadn’t ended up being rape, when the laird had tired of having to feed and house her, it would have been quite a horrible death.
She realized she was wheezing. Patrick was stroking her hair and making shh-ing noises. She calmed her breathing with great effort.
“I was thinking,” she managed.
“Aye, I gathered that.”
“You’re not a bad swordsman.”
He laughed suddenly and she felt as if the world had trembled because of it. “Thank you, my lady.”
“I’d like not to have to watch you do that business in the Fergusson hall again.”
“I’ll do my best to avoid it for the both of us.” He caressed the side of her thumb with his own. His hand was warm. Hers was so cold, it was almost painful to have it warmed. “You learned my tongue,” he said.
“So many curses, so little time,” she said lightly. “Shall I impress you with what I learned?”
“As you will.”
She called him several of the names she’d learned, felt him gasp in surprise, then felt it in her to attempt a small laugh herself.
“By the saints,” he managed.
“I was trying to take my mind off my location.” In fact, she’d concentrated so hard on the language, she was already dreaming in it. Her father would be proud. She wondered, absently, if she would have the chance to tell him, or if she would be spending the rest of her life in the Middle Ages.
What else was going to happen? Were they going to get home? Was Patrick going to take her back home with him? Or was he going to hang out with her in the past? Would he get her somewhere safe, then just leave her there?
She blinked back tears.